In this interview from the Erlang Factory event in London, three creators of modern functional languages -- Martin Odersky, creator of Scala; Joe Armstrong, a creator of Erlang; and Don Syme, creator of F# -- discuss the similarities and differences of their creations. They also discuss their languages’ common thread -- that they integrate object-oriented features in functional languages.

Functional programming experts Simon Thompson and John Hughes discuss functional programming in today’s computing environments, particularly through the use of the Erlang and Haskell languages. In addition to debating the intricacies of both languages and their similarities and differences, Thompson and Hughes also discuss the growing popularity and maturity if functional programming.

John Hughes is the author of “Why functional programming matters” paper and in this interview he outlines the merits of functional programming and the reason for his involvement with it. He also goes over several core principles of functional programming like monads, handling of side-effects, etc.

Jim Coplien, co-creator of Data, Context and Interaction (DCI) architecture, covers a variety of topics including DCI, the importance of language support for DCI and the state of Agile development. Coplien has championed the DCI architecture with Trygve ReensKaug, the inventor of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates data and its processing from presentation.

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